Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday June 08, 2011 @01:07PM
from the won't-somebody-please-think-of-the-mutants dept.

mdsolar writes "In the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, [German Chancellor] Merkel announced that her country would close all of its 17 existing reactors by 2022. Other nations, including Japan, Italy, and Switzerland, have announced plans to pare back nuclear power, but none have gone as far as Germany, the world's fourth-largest economy. Merkel vows to replace nuclear power with alternatives that do not increase greenhouse gases or shackle the economic growth. Could the US do the same? An increasing number of reports suggest it is not beyond the realm of possibility, and Germany could provide a road map."

Don't forget Big Oil and Big Coal. They would love the US to be nuclear free. There are plenty of lignite coal deposits and plenty of small towns just itching for toxic mine tailings to wind up in the ground water.

Realistically, lets close nuclear plants... the first gen ones. Replace those with passively safe breeding designs like TWR that can happily chug on fuel until it is plain old lead suitable for adding to paint chips. Done right, we can take the high level nuclear products from older reactors and use it for more than triggering NIMBY knee jerk politics near Yucca Mountain.

There is nothing wrong with nuclear power. We just need to move to designs of plants made after the conflict in Viet Nam, or ideally, designs made this millennium.

This is yet another FUD article on nuclear power [slashdot.org] submitted by mdsolar [slashdot.org]. I personally have nothing against publicizing the dangers of nuclear power, but this should be done in a fair way. User mdsolar has repeatedly posted FUD articles on nuclear power and frequently gets them through because of the mass volume of his submissions and the lack of attention paid by the moderators to specific users' agendas.

mdsolar, reveal yourself. What is your viable plan for generating electricity once you have wiped all the reactors off the map? How do you plan on dealing with the decommissioning and waste? Could you try easing up and submitting articles not chock-full of such alarmist banter? Are you a BP employee?

mdsolar may well have an axe to grind... but that doesn't automatically mean that any source he submits ought to be dismissed out of hand. The Christian Science Monitor is a pretty well-regarded newspaper - not exactly birdcage lining material. So although skepticism is always warranted, let's not throw out this particular article because the contributor has posted questionable ones before.

The issue with nuclear power isn't safety, it's economics. The real reason no nuclear plants have been built in the US in recent years: investors can't be found... because the nuclear construction industry is absolutely legendary for cost overruns. Nuclear power is quite risky, not in the safety sense, but economically. A popular response this is "that's because there's too much regulation of the nuclear industry". My answer to that: you want to reduce the regulatory burden on the nuclear industry? Ok, NOW you've got a safety problem. It's true that nuclear plants are, by and large, quite safe. The reason they're safe is because they're heavily, heavily regulated. If they weren't, does anyone honestly believe they wouldn't cut corners on safety?

All that being said: if we're going to massively replace parts of our electrical generation system, for God's sake don't mess with the nuclear plants. Go for the low-hanging fruit - coal fired plants. These things are way, way more damaging to the environment (both from their own emissions and the devastation caused by coal mining) than nuclear ever thought of being. Closing down zero emission nuclear plants while leaving massively polluting coal plants in operation is just tremendously dumb.

Reading through the first and second pages comes up with such treats as "Fukushima meltdown could be template for terror", "sustainability experts: nuclear energy not essential", "radiation understated after quake" and "nuclear in 2018 more expensive than solar PV today". Definitely an agenda there, especially with the abuse of the word 'terror', regardless of whether or not the stories are credible.

How is asking the question whether the US could phase out nuclear power FUD? It's a perfectly legitimate question. The GP just does not want it asked, so he resorts to an ad hominem/poisoning the well against the submitter. It's perfectly fine to ask what we do with the waste, by the way. And if the answer - as you, and the GP seem to agree upon - is that we have no clue, that is a pretty strong argument to research possibilities of a phase-out, instead of accumulating more of it.

It is getting there. India has done some with their Kakrapar reactor, although not as a direct fuel source.

We have a nice vicious cycle here. People are afraid of nuclear power, so they want to defund research that makes using Pu and uranium a thing of the past. Because of slow advances in nuclear research, people continue to equate nuclear power with reactors made when McCarthy was saying that a commie was under every bed, and sock hops were the rage.

No interest in R&D for better energy solutions is pure suicide on a national level.

My only reservation about nuclear can be boiled down to the statement, "We can't trust a lot of contractors to build showerheads with proper grounding to keep people using them from being electrocuted. How can we trust people who are just there for the next quarter's dollar to build something that is as intricate as a reactor, no matter how well the design?"

Part of the problem is that you think the fact that your shower head is electrified is a result of people building shower heads wrong, when the reality of it is, you've got to be actually constructing your house/building with wiring completely incorrect to the point that you're going to be sinking massive amounts of energy directly into the ground well before you get electrocuted. Your entire pipe system should be grounded in multiple places, and directly at all the faucets, which is why they have holes an

10000 years+? Huh? How stupid are you? Honestly, I'm asking a real question here, not a personal attack. All it seems you've bought into is the usual fearmongering bullshit. Have you actually BEEN to a place that has any fallout you bitch about? I've been to Hiroshima AND Fukushima. Know what I found? Deadgrowth on Miyajima island nearby Hiroshima, lush greenery, beautiful scenery, oh, and amazing cities bereft of any signs there was a radioactive event sans a handful of monuments. Hell, Chernobyl would be

Fear, maybe, but ignorance? I'd say it's more an issue of trust. Not everyone can be a nuclear engineer, but most can smell the stink when the assurances they are given by them are contradicted repeatedly by empirical reality. When people who purport to know what they're talking about ridicule popular concerns about safety and accidents, they allow themselves to appear cavalier about those matters, which erodes public confidence even further.

Personally, I believe that nuclear energy should be part of the mix in the future. But the next time the impossible happens and a reactor melts down, don't try to convince me that it's no worse than standing next to a bunch of bananas.

The question is not whether it's worse than standing next to a bunch of bananas. The question is whether it's worse than an alternative source of energy. Assuming the demand for power stays constant (and it's certainly not going down), shutting down a nuclear power plant requires additional power to be generated elsewhere.

Clearly, a nuclear power plant is less safe than an open field. But is it worse than a coal plant, or a natural gas plant, or the equivalent solar or windmill farm? And by what metrics are we measuring 'safety'? How do you compare the (fairly unlikely) danger of a radiation leak at a nuclear plant to the effects of toxic rain, deforestation, and other byproducts of coal?

Operational impacts can be planned for and reasonably dealt with. Failure impacts cannot. At some point the level of planning fails because of unforeseen risks. You can mitigate as best as possible, but you can never solve the problem with certainty.

Solar/wind is lower than either on both accounts. The energy 'storage' technology isn't yet ready for wind/solar to be grid scale but it is coming.

Yep I am. A sludge tsunami effects exactly 1 river basin over a short distance. Coal mine fires generally don't force evacuations of 50 miles or more. Centralia, PA [wikipedia.org] is a good example. "The only indications of the fire, which underlies some 400 acres (1.6 km)" 'roughly' ONE square mile of affected area.

Sure they could. Never underestimate the power of fear and ignorance, my friend.

All fear and ignorance will accomplish is to prevent new plants from being built, thus extending the life of the old ones, perhaps making them more dangerous. We'll still be dependent on nuclear power, it will just be a bunch of 40+ year old plants instead of shiny new ones.

A knee-jerk reaction to an incident at one of the oldest reactors in the world, triggered by a record breaking natural disaster, is the LAST thing we need in an economy that is already weak due to rising energy costs.

If we pull a Germany, I'm going to have to start learning French or Chinese I think...

Coal power is a major polluter, both air AND soil/water. Look at the Kingston fly ash spill...Natural gas may burn clean, but the process for extracting it from the ground has contaminated more water resources and sickened more people in 5-10 years than the entire history of United States nuclear power generation.We're tapped out on hydro - and that isn't completely safe either (Banqiao Dam anyone?)Wind and solar are too variable for more than 10-20% penetration given the current energy storage technology we have. In Washington or Oregon, they have frequently had to shut down wind farms because the windiest times were also the rainiest, which meant that the hydro facilities were cranking at full capacity. Denmark exports a significant portion of its wind power and then buys it back from their nuclear/hydro-enabled neighbors, and many believe this is at a significant loss. (Denmark sells it when it's abundant and hence cheap, and buys it back when it's more expensive.)

Nuclear isn't perfect either - but of all of the power generation technologies out there, it has the cleanest and safest track record. Chernobyl and Fukushima are the only times in the history of nuclear power generation that more than a handful of members of the public have been exposed to anything but negligible hazards. (Note: I don't count incidents related to weapons detonation or production such as Kyshtm, since most countries are dismantling weapons instead of producing them.) Technically you could even throw Chernobyl into the weapons category, since its flawed and dangerous design compromised safety in favor of suitability for weapons production.

Actually, the short answer is "yes". The long answer is "We could certainly phase out nuclear power with some economic sacrifice, but in the first place 'could we?' is the wrong question. The right question is 'should we?'"

Unfortunately, the answers to questions like "*should we*" tend to start with "It depends." Then they go on to raise a whole new set of questions like "What kinds of nuclear plants will we build to replace the existing ones as they are retired?" Not at all pithy, I'm afraid.

Power reactors do not produce plutonium for bombs. A power reactor fuel cycle produces plutonium that contains a substantial percentage of the isotopes Pu240 and Pu242. These are fine for reactor fuel, but they have a high spontaneous fission rate, which makes them very bad for bombs. (Hint: Neither India nor Pakistan used plutonium from their power reactors to make their bombs -- they both went to the great trouble and expense of building special-purpose breeder reactors. Ask yourself why.)

Um, no, it's not. Show one example of a civilian nuclear reactor in the United States being used for weapons production. Also note that we're one of the few countries that does NOT reprocess their spent nuclear fuels, with proliferation fears being the primary reason why.

By their nature, the type of reactors used in the USA are not very suitable for producing weapons materials. They are difficult to refuel frequently, so the plutonium produced is contaminated with Pu-240 (bad for weapons). So reactors used for weapons production tend to be designed for frequent refueling to reduce the Pu-240 content. This generally results in various graphite-moderated designs. To my knowledge, the USA never used weapons reactors for civilian power generation. The UK may have (Magnox reactors), and the Soviets most assuredly did. (The graphite-moderated water-cooled reactor at Chernobyl was perfect for weapons production - it could even be refueled while operational.)

At this point, many countries are actually dismantling weapons and using the plutonium to fuel reactors (MOX fuel), or in the case of HEU weapons- diluting it to produce reactor LEU. See Megatons for Megawatts - many of our civilian reactors are fueled by dismantled Russian bombs.

Indeed, I read the article about Germany's plan to phase out nuclear power, and honestly it felt more like a short term grab for political power in the wake of Japan's issues to get more votes from the antinuke/enviormental crowd than an actual plan with substance.

It most definitely was that.There were State elections in Baden Wuertemburg several weeks ago, the CDU have *always* ruled there - often with over 50% of the votes.

The Ecology Party (Gruenen) won the election and are going into coalition with the SPD. The FDP (the CDU's partners at State and national level) did not get any seats at all. Merkel panicked.

There were some major reasons why the CDU lost their majority - mostly CDU initiatives which had gone expensively south, although Fukushima will also have been a factor. The CDU decided they had lost touch with their electorate (true) and it was all down to Fukushima (debatable).

There are several State elections this year. One has been held since that nuclear decision. The CDU came in third, their worst result anywhere since the war. The FDP did not pick up any seats there either.

Funnily enough Germany is actually exporting solar power to France, because nuclear power can't provide power during peak hours and solar does. Germany is one of the biggest solar producers, with a capacity of almost 17GW.

Germany is not phasing out nuclear power. They will need to import power in the short- and medium-term from France and England, both of which are nuclear-heavy (particularly France). Germany will still use nuclear-generated electricity; they're just playing a "not in my back yard" game. And by "they", I mean politicians which are pandering to their electorate to try to keep in power.

Long-term, they are putting themselves at the mercy of Russia. The NordStream natural gas pipeline will eventually be providing fuel, which can and will be used as a political lever (Russia has successfully done so several times in the past to strong-arm NATO over membership for the Ukraine and Georgia). Also, natural gas is a fossil fuel just like oil, and if the CO2 boogeyman is still the boogeyman, well... how does that not cause problems? On a per-megawatt basis, nuclear power remains much cheaper than natural gas, and a full decimal order of magnitude cheaper than solar (recall how far north Germany is. That's a problem for solar.) Switching from nuclear power to natural gas is not a step forward, economically, politically, ecologically

This is just another example of politicians doing long-term harm for short-term political dominance.

Germany is not phasing out nuclear power. They will need to import power in the short- and medium-term from France and England, both of which are nuclear-heavy (particularly France). Germany will still use nuclear-generated electricity; they're just playing a "not in my back yard" game. And by "they", I mean politicians which are pandering to their electorate to try to keep in power.

Off course they will continue to im- and export electricity to neighbouring countries depending on the day. That's how the electricity market works. France's nuclear reactor for example tend to produce far to little electricity during the hottest part of the summer since they are mostly dependent on river water for cooling. Looking at the total energy consumption and production over the course of a year however Germany has a large electricity surplus. In 2009 this was 54.1 TWh (592.6 produced vs. 538.5 consumed [energy.eu])

As a matter of fact, the seven oldest nuclear plants can be shutdown without any problems [spiegel.de] immediately (which is what happened) since there is a significant production surplus. Even without the other nuclear power plants and all wind and solar power Germany still has enough production capacity to meet it's highest consumption moment so far. In practice that moment is always during the afternoon when you are guaranteed at least a quarter of installed solar power plus some of the wind power (since it's distributed across the fairly large country).

Long-term, they are putting themselves at the mercy of Russia. The NordStream natural gas pipeline will eventually be providing fuel, which can and will be used as a political lever (Russia has successfully done so several times in the past to strong-arm NATO over membership for the Ukraine and Georgia).

However, unlike the Ukraine and Georgia Germany has other sources of Gas (the Netherlands and Norway) and significant storage capacity.

Also, natural gas is a fossil fuel just like oil, and if the CO2 boogeyman is still the boogeyman, well... how does that not cause problems? On a per-megawatt basis, nuclear power remains much cheaper than natural gas, and a full decimal order of magnitude cheaper than solar (recall how far north Germany is. That's a problem for solar.) Switching from nuclear power to natural gas is not a step forward, economically, politically, ecologically

The difference is that gas can be put into service (or out) much faster than nuclear. Itâ(TM)s a much better partner for intermittent renewables (Which is what Germany is going for to replace the nuclear power plants). And while existing nuclear electricity is indeed very cheap (because the massive investment cost have already been depreciated and because the producers donâ(TM)t have to pay for decommissioning). New nuclear power is a lot more expensive, doubly so after Fukushima. Building one on spec (that is, without public financial guarantees and/or investment)to be finished in 2018 is already more expensive [slashdot.org] than some of the feed in tariffs paid in Germany for solar now. Most wind is already cheaper than any kind nuclear plant that still has to be built. And solar is expected to continue getting cheaper (the price of photovoltaic installations in Germany has halved in the last five years [solarwirtschaft.de] thanks to economy of scale and technological improvements)

This is just another example of politicians doing long-term harm for short-term political dominance.

Well, the nuclear fase out plan in Germany has been on the books for years. Itâ(TM)s was only in the last y

That is not correct - Germany is typically a net importer from France. Also, you're wrong about the relative size of wind. Germany's electricity mix is something like this:
23% nuclear
23% lignite (brown coal, the worst type)
20% black coal
13% natgas
7% wind
14% other (hydro, biomass, waste, PV)
It is simply evil of them to prioritize a phase-out of nuclear power before a phase-out of fossils and biomass.

Why don't you read the fine print in the lower right corner?Actually it is not even written very small, but in very big letters: It is something like this: this is raw power transfer and not contracted power.

The power coming into germany from france is not IMPORTED but TRANSMITTED FURTHER into other countries.

If you can not get that the picture you see is a european grid and it shows the power transport from country to country you are not qualified to participate in this discussion.

True. However, According to the CIA World Factbook [cia.gov], Germany exported 61.7 billion kWh (last estimate available from 2008). At the same time. The whole European super grid thing, you know. Germany is a net exporter - even after taking down half the nuclear capacity already.

Yea I love the tone of the sumary because the first question is can Germany phase out nuclear power at all. They have not done it and the rest of the it is just so much fantasy. Of course what the Green party doesn't know is they are going to replace Nuclear with carbon neutral whale oil fired plants.

No. This is just another anti-nuclear FUD article from mdsolar. Secondly, if the US did phase it out what exactly is going to replace it? More coal plants? Yeah, that sounds like a brilliant plan but would be an extremely amusing backfire from the anti-nuke nuts campaign.

Merkel vows to replace nuclear power with alternatives that do not increase greenhouse gases or shackle the economic growth.

Which basically leaves them with no viable alternative. Solar, wind and water can not produce the same amount of energy as nuclear even under perfect theoretical conditions let alone all the extra land required to build these alternatives.

If you were willing to pay an unlimited amount for power you could do solar and wind. Nuclear, Coal, and gas could all be replaced if people were willing to pay more, a lot more.

Over here in reality, we need new nuclear plants and solar thermal where it makes sense. Wind power in other areas can also work out quite well. To meet our needs at prices people are willing to pay power will have to come from mixed sources.

Can we stop being scared of fission please. Yes it will kill people so will coal solar wind hydro etc. Please can we live in the real world where people die. Once we do that we can figure out that fission is the next to least bad option next to hydro. Since nearly all the potential hydro is tapped out already it's the only currently viable option.

Here's my take, if a nuclear reactor explodes, a rare but possible occurrence, it will contaminate a hundred square kilometers or so so it cannot be inhabited for a century or there abouts. If you want a hydro system with the same power output, you generally flood a valley and not only prevent it from being inhabited while the dam stands, but also ruin it for plants and animals too, unlike Chernobyl which is returning to natural forest flora and fauna. Nuclear probably won't explode and if it does, it still

The problem is that a big disaster in a nuclear power plant affects a wide area and is broadcasted around the world, so people are afraid of it, while coal and other methods kill people all the time, but only in small numbers at once, so nobody cares.

It's the same as with planes vs cars for transport. People die in car accidents every day, but since the numbers are small nobody cares. On the other hand, if a plane crashes somewhere, half the world knows about it since a lot of people die at once.

The great American cities we have today would have never been built if there was this much fear of the remote possibility of injury or death. Under today's mindset, you would have never had people walking the beams in Manhattan in order to build all that, as quickly and cheaply as they did.

People are dying TODAY from coal and oil. Thousands of them per year. Can we please build something that only has a chance of killing people, rather than assuring people die?

Hydro is only "not bad" if you don't live near where it buggers up the ecosystem, like I do.

Make no mistake: hydro is not as "cheap" as it appears to be. It has hidden expenses (just look at the fish barging on the Snake River) and in many cases is not, in the long run, sustainable unless you want to kill off whole species.

People tend to think hydro is "clean" because it doesn't dump poison into the atmosphere or leak radiation into the ground. But it does leak "poison" (oxygenation) into the water, and it disrupts all kinds of things in the ecosystem, from algae all the way up to peak predators.

With newer reactor designs, it could be even better. We still need to come up with a good solution for the waste, though. Nobody has any idea how much it will cost to deal with as we're currently just putting it aside.

The numbers you linked are off by several orders of magnitude. They include only direct deaths during mining, transport and burning. Pollution is not included.

And, let's think, what is more dangerous: pollution that makes it hard to see, gives people asthma, causes old people to suffocate, makes trees lose all leaves, and so on, or pollution that is locked in steel barrels sealed in tons of concrete under a mountain?

If the irrational over-reaction to nuclear power based on the Fukushima disaster were mirrored in other industries, then the Titanic would have ended the ship industry, and Ford's exploding Pinto would have ended the auto industry.

And just because water-cooled nuclear reactors were and always will be a stupid idea, doesn't mean that all types of nuclear reactors are stupid ideas.

And you men and half of the Internet as well are just as bad. We sit here, considering Wikipedia the all-in-all. We consider the greatest end of science is the classification of past data. It is important, but is there no further work to be done? We're receding and forgetting, don't you see? Here in the America they've lost nuclear power. In Japan, a power plant has undergone meltdown because of poor repairs, and the Chancellor of the Empire complains that nuclear technicians are scarce. And the solution? To train new ones? Never! Instead they're to restrict nuclear power.

The most rational, prudent, safe, and progressive thing to do would be to phase out the current, 1st generation plants, but simultaneously remove, insofar as possible, obstacles to safer 2nd / 3rd generation designs such as CANDU.

Look at deaths/megawatt hour. Nuclear is much lower than coal, gas/oil, hydro, and wind. (Forget about solar). Sure nuclear makes the news more often, but it's because it's scarier. Just as the e. coli outbreak is terrifying people but less than 20 have died from it.

How the hell does anyone get killed by wind, unless they fall off a tower? And deaths/megawatt hour for nuclear are hard to figure, as it may take years to die from radiation exposure, and it can manifest itself in a number of ways. Plus there's the whole issue of rendering a large area uninhabitable for generations. [wikipedia.org]

Germany will fill the gap using dung fired power plants using all the horse crap from the state mandated horse based transportation system. Though of course, fossil fuel based transportation will remain available to citizens making above a certain amount of Deutschmarks and the political class since they have important business to conduct. All nice and tidy, and somewhere in all that crap, there's a pony!

Other forms of power kill more people than nuclear, nuclear just does so in a flashy form and in obvious clusters around the release. Coal, on the other hand, kills a lot more people, but does so over a longer period of time and over the entire area the particulate emissions spread...in other words, everywhere.

But hey, don't let that stop you policy makers. Do the thing that makes it look like you're taking action rather than taking the RIGHT action.

The US hasn't built a new plant since TMI. As plants are decommissioned they're being replaced with coal and Natural gas plants.

What really needs to happen is a complete phase out of the older generation [wikipedia.org] nuclear power plants and a phase in of the next generation [wikipedia.org] of nuclear power. From there, we use the knowledge gained from the reactor replacements to build the future generation [wikipedia.org] plants.

Sitting back and letting our plants get older and older instead of replacing them on schedule is like sitting on a time bomb.

I was watching a Nova documentary on the weekend about the issue of power in the US. it came out after Fukushima and there was this one guy who used to be an activist against nuclear power in the 70's talking about it. He said something along the line of even after the Fukushima disaster it's still a viable solution.

The documentary went on to show how newer models were being built to be safer. They were starting to standardize and simplify their models of plants to make them more safe. One thing for instance was the water tanks were above the reactors so if there was a complete loss of power and diesel generators failed gravity would still be able to pump cooling water into the reactor for a period of time(until the tank runs out something like 1-3 days).

The reactors that are a problem are the ones built in the 70's these need to be phased out, the U.S. hasn't built a new reactor since it was banned in the 70's. This scares the hell out of me. Proper construction and disposal of waste could be a lot cleaner than coal.

There are plenty of reactor designs that do not need Pu in the fuel. Thorium reactors come to mind. To boot, thorium is relatively cheap, and the biggest deposits are in countries that have decent infrastructure.

There are other designs that do not use plutonium in any, shape, or form. TWR designs come to mind. In fact, most Gen IV designs are similar. No way these designs are going to be spitting any Pu amounts, much less enough to make it useful for terrorists.

If we want to be sure that we don't want one of our major cities to be blown up one day, we should shut down nuclear power

Of course! It is not like there are THOUSANDS of NUCLEAR WEAPONS ready to do actual damage at moments notice. No sir!! After all, nuclear power produces plutonium so efficiently that the highly inefficient US military decided to make their own plutonium pits instead for these weapons..

And of course plutonium cannot be used as a fuel because using that instead of virgin uranium makes bunnies cry.

proliferation point of view, with respect to the risk of nuclear terrorism

I say we go further. burn all physics books!, especially those ones that deal with particle and nuclear physics. No one needs to know about cross sections. It is the devils knowledge!!

On a more serious note, anyone that brings up proliferation as a significant problem is a little crazy. You know, there are these things like radiation detectors that can detect a few atoms of contamination. I think they would detect a nuclear reactor worth of fuel going missing... It is not easy to build a nuclear weapon even though conceptually it seems so. An effective plutonium device is very difficult to produce and a "dirty bomb" is the most useless type of a bomb and it is easy to clean up.

If you want to worry about proliferation, worry about chemical and biological agents because these happened and are likely to happen again.

PS. This was mostly sarcasm, but since mdsolar is probably modding with 10 accounts, this will get -1 anyway;)

And finally, nuclear energy from Uranium will not become exhausted for at least 1000 years. With fusion, nuclear will be permanent base load, unless we nuke ourselves over coal/oil/gas/food/water (take your pick) to kingdom come..

One also has to look at the high level nuclear waste. There isn't that much of it. On a pragmatic basis, toss it in a breeder reactor and keep using it until it turns to lead.

You underscored a problem. People go batshit when they hear the word "nuclear". Take a MRI for example. It used to be called NMRI. However, people heard the first word in that abbreviation and thought that their body's component atoms would wind up ripped apart like a bad Star Trek transporter malfunction if they were scanned by

Big Oil knows its stuff, and the fear campaign is working, and has worked since even before 3MI. The guys know that nuclear power would kill Big Oil.

Why? Reactions that are (as of now) energy expensive could be done on massive scales. Desalinate water, pull CO2 from the air, combine the two in a number of reactions, and one can get ethanol. Combine a reactor and a thermal depolymerization plant (which essentially "boils" plastic to short chain carbon atoms), and gasoline would be ready to be used from t

Given the rampant groundwater and stream contamination resulting from hydrofracturing operations south of me in Pennsylvania - I'll take a brand-new modern nuke plant in my area over the commencement of gas drilling operations without any hesitation.

This is one of the key reasons I am a much bigger supporter of the nuclear industry than the gas industry. The nuclear industry admits to their mistakes and constantly strives to improve safety - look at the vast improvements in safety design from BWR to ABWR to ESBWR even before the first BWR accident in history. When an accident occurs, changes are made to prevent it from happening again.

The gas industry, on the other hand, simply says "we are safe". They won't tell you what is within the fr